Compound Exercises are the Key to Building Muscle

You’re wasting your time in the gym. Big arms do not come from barbell curls or triceps pushdowns. Great legs don’t come from leg extensions and leg curls. The key to efficiently building quality muscle is to ditch the isolation exercises and start replacing them with compound exercises.

Why are Compound Exercises the Best for Building Muscle?

Compound exercises work many muscle groups at one time. Isolation exercises, on the other hand, work a single muscle. Because of this, you can get a greater amount of work done in a shorter amount of time using compound exercises. In addition, since compound exercises work several muscle groups at once, they help you to improve your insulin sensitivity. By depleting glycogen stores in several muscles, you enable your body to keep insulin levels low the rest of the day so that fatty acid mobilization can occur.

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Compound exercises also cause a positive hormonal response that is beneficial towards building muscle. Hormones like testosterone and growth hormone are boosted in response to a set of squats. Doing a set of squats will activate every muscle from head to toe. It forces you to have a high-intensity workout, which is key for both muscle building and fat loss.

Big arms are not made with isolation curls, they are made with heaving rowing and pressing movements. A 300-400 pound bench press is going to do more for your arms than any triceps kickbacks or pushdown will do. The same goes for your legs. You can sit on the leg extension machine trying to build great quads, and you might get a great pump and burn from it, but nothing is going to build great legs like squats will.

Isolation exercises have their place. However, they should not be the core of your workout. I will take that one step further and say that unless you are an advanced, or intermediate advanced weight lifter, there really is no reason to have isolation exercises in your routine. You will build all the muscle you need, and in a faster amount of time, if you would just stick to the core compound exercises.

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Best Compound Exercises

The list of compound exercises is long, but there are a dozen or so core movements that you can incorporate that will make a big impact. These core movements also have several variations to them. You can change the resistance curve by adding bands or chains, or you can change hand positioning to target slightly different muscles. You can also do their bodyweight versions. Here’s a list of compound exercises you should consider adding into your workout program.

• Bench Press
• Squats
• Deadlifts
• Pullups
• Good Mornings
• Military Press
• Barbell Rows
• Front Squats
• Incline Press
• Stiff Legged Deadlifts

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Whether you’re a male or female, these principles still apply. There is no best exercise for a girl or best exercise for a guy. Muscle is muscle, and it grows the same regardless of gender. Men might have an easier time putting on muscle because of their hormonal profile, but that just makes it even more important that women take advantage of compound exercises.